Chris Coons: The Bearded Marxist
by Stephan Tawney on September 18, 2010
I’ve spent some time slamming Christine O’Donnell so it’s only fair I point out the biggest problem with her opponent: He once proudly admitted to being a Marxist. Yes, really.
An article Democrat Chris Coons wrote for his college newspaper may not go over so well in corporation-friendly Delaware, where he already faces an uphill battle for Vice President Joe Biden’s old Senate seat.The title? “Chris Coons: The Making of a Bearded Marxist.”
Again, that’s the title that Coons himself gave the article.
In the article, Coons, then 21 years old and about to graduate from Amherst College, chronicled his transformation from a sheltered, conservative-minded college student who had worked for former GOP Delaware Sen. William Roth and had campaigned for Ronald Reagan in 1980 into a cynical young adult who was distrustful of American power and willing to question the American notion of free enterprise.
What happened? He visited Kenya — coincidentally Obama’s fatherland.
The source of his conversion, Coons wrote, was a trip to Kenya he took during the spring semester of his junior year—a time away from America, he wrote, that served as a “catalyst” in altering a conservative political outlook that he was growing increasingly uncomfortable with.“My friends now joke that something about Kenya, maybe the strange diet, or the tropical sun, changed my personality; Africa to them seems a catalytic converter that takes in clean-shaven, clear-thinking Americans and sends back bearded Marxists,” Coons wrote, noting that at one time he had been a “proud founding member of the Amherst College Republicans.”“[I]t is only too easy to return from Africa glad to be American and smugly thankful for our wealth and freedom,” added Coons. “Instead, Amherst had taught me to question, so in turn I questioned Amherst, and America.”
Coons went on:
In one passage of the article, Coons explains how in the months leading up to the trip abroad “leftists” on campus and college professors had begun to “challenge the basic assumptions” he had formed about America.A course on cultural anthropology, noted Coons, had “undermined the accepted value of progress and the cultural superiority of the West,” while a class on the Vietnam War led him to “suspect…that the ideal of America as a ‘beacon of freedom and justice, providing hope for the world’ was not exactly based in reality.”
And this is why, no matter how nutty Christine O’Donnell may have sounded in her past, I’ll still support her over Chris Coons.
I’d rather have a somewhat-nutty defender of the free market and America than a far-leftist guy who proudly admitted to being a “bearded Marxist” who says he discovered that America is not a beacon of freedom and justice.
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20. September 2010 at 9:21 pm
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14. October 2010 at 9:23 am